We often hear people saying that Google has changed the rules of search engine optimisation – but we don’t agree with that view. Nothing has happened in the last few years, even with all the major Panda and Penguin updates that have affected Google’s drive to return the best results for a visitor’s query.

What Has Really Changed With Search Engine Optimisation?

What has happened is that they have vastly improved their methods at weeding out websites that are trying to take shortcuts to the top of the search results by pretending to be more popular than they are in reality.

In the past, Google could be fooled into believing a website was the best and most popular result by seeing a multitude of backlinks to the website from many sources, countries and industries – and this is what has actually changed. Yes, the guys at Google have developed ways that will uncover “false” popularity signals created by poor search engine optimisation methods, so that the old goalposts have effectively been moved now.

Website owners and administrators need to spend less time trying to find ways around the latest search engine algorithm changes and use their time more effectively by making their websites a place where visitors will enjoy going to and spending their time.

If you want to know more about our search engine optimisation services – then please get in touch.

Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about improving the volume and quality of traffic to your website. SEO gives your site “web presence” by optimizing pages so that, when a potential customer performs a search, your business will appear higher in the search results listing, making it more likely that you will be contacted before your competitors. Pages can be optimized for global searches, local searches, image searches, video searches, or industry-specific searches.

Basically, SEO uses the knowledge of how search engines work, and the way people search, to benefit your business. Optimizing a website or webpages for searches involves editing the actual content of the site as well as modifying the coding of the site (such as HTML) in such a way that its relevance to certain keywords is increased. Barriers to the effective search engine indexing are also altered or removed.

Optimizing your website also involves are variety of other techniques to increase its search ranking. Pages within your website may be cross-linked (one page links to another in the same site) to give prominence to the main page. The meta-tags of a page, those descriptors that exist in the code but are not seen, are also altered to advantage.

Email Marketing Services
Email marketing is a type of direct marketing; it involves transmitting advertising messages to a target audience via email. Email marketing is a great way to communicate directly with your customers. In fact, more buyers prefer to receive an advertisement or sales message via email than any other form of direct marketing, including by telephone or mail. In addition, email marketing is extremely cost-effective.

You can use email marketing services for your business by sending emails in order to acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to make a purchase, such as by advertising special rates or a sale or by providing detailed information about a product you think would suit their needs. Email marketing services can also be used to build loyalty in your current customer base and are a perfect way of encouraging repeat business.

Email marketing is also green and it can even be automated to save you time. However, proceed with caution. When email marketing is not designed professionally, it can be difficult for buyers, and email filters, to distinguish between legitimate email marketing and spam messages. To make sure that your email marketing campaign will not wind up in a junk mail folder somewhere, consider hiring a professional to make email marketing work for you.

Social Media Management
Social media is something on everyone’s lips today, but what about the management of it? Social media is a free resource and one of the best ways to get the word out about a product, service, or company when used correctly.

There are two primary ways that social media management is used. The first is through the social media itself. Aspects such as RSS feeds, sharing, user rating and polling, etc. have the power to involve your customer base in way that is virtually unprecedented. You can get opinions, ask for recommendations, explain product functionality, and really add a face and a personality to your business. Social media may also be used in a promotional way through activities such as blogging, commenting on blogs, participation in discussion groups, updating social networking profiles, etc.

Whatever method used, you are essentially creating word-of-mouth and developing a brand image or reputation through social media. Using social media effectively involves more than just marketing and brand building, although they are important elements. Social media is becoming an increasing strategic element in knowledge management, specifically product/service development, recruiting, employee relationships, customer relations, and business development. However, effective use of social media may require professional management, Hiring a professional to provide social media management is over 36 percent more effective than doing it yourself, and that is if you are social media savvy.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has enormous potential to increase your online presence and bring more traffic to your website. A relatively newer technology, PPC advertising involves the placement of a small ad on a search results page when a specific keyword or topic is entered. In return, you pay a certain sum when someone actually clicks on the ad.

PPC advertising helps you find targeted users and direct them to your product or service offering or website. A PPC listing on a search results page generally consists of a short title or heading (around 50 characters maximum) and a short (less than 200 characters) description of your product or service and a link to your website. You specify the keywords that you want to trigger your ad and when someone performs a search using those keywords, your ad will appear.

The placement of your ad will depend on the “quality score” it receives; the quality is calculated by the relevance of your ad and keywords, the popularity of the ad, etc. The method used to determine ranking and quality will differ slightly from host to host. Over 79 percent of businesses that use professional PPC advertising service say that the method is an effective way to increase sales.

Social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, receive a great deal of attention for their uses in business-to-consumer scenarios. In these situations, social media sites can act as a way to build customer relationships, obtain market research, identify trends, etc. If your company operates business-to-business, traditional social media marketing techniques, however, rarely make the grade. In addition, using business-to-consumer techniques to appeal to a business customer can even devalue your company’s brand image, making your efforts look haphazard and dated. For the business-to-business company, social media presents its own advantages and requires its own techniques:

Awareness
One of the most important things you can do to build your business is to build awareness. Using social media you can do things like post pictures, link to pictures and news stories, and post links to your company’s profile on industry sites. For example, if you have a fitness center, you could include pictures of your gym’s facilities and profiles of the trainers you employ. You could also post links to any news coverage your gym receives and post links to your gym’s profile on any local weight loss groups. Alternatively, if you sell steel buildings, you could post pictures of the various types of steel buildings you offer and the assorted ways your buildings are used (e.g. warehouse, grain storage, soccer stadium). In addition, you could post links to your company’s profile on group pages centered on farming, industry, fitness centers, etc.

In each example, you are building awareness of the products you offer and the ways in which those products can be used. While you may have many of these elements on your website, including them in your social media will ensure that when someone is looking to fill a need, your company can be found easily.

Broadcast and Engage
More and more people, including business owners and managers, are looking to social media to find information on companies and products before ever using a search engine. As such, having adequate information available where your customers look is critical. An increasing number of businesses are searching for business-to-business companies using the medium of social media, however the level of buy-in is variant – Some companies may do an amazing amount of business through social media while others may only get on social media sites for personal use. One of the easiest ways to catch the attention of the entire range is to broadcast and engage.

Broadcast industry news, trending topics related to your business, new product development, new technology, etc. Essentially, give your potential customers a reason to visit your social media page. The goal is to establish your business as an expert in your industry or, in other words, as an industry resource. Once you have established your company as such, business customers will visit your profile or “friend it” just to get an update on what is happening in the industry.

Further, engage your business customers (current or potential) in the same way. For instance, if you have a graphic design company, you would want to broadcast market research reports and findings, the relative successes clients have had using your services, etc. In addition, you would want to engage your business customers by responding to comments as “the” business, such as you posted the results from the latest Nielsen report and one of your customers writes something like “So, Facebook really is taking over the Internet.” Instead of responding as a friend (e.g. “Yeah, my kids are always on the site”), you would want to respond, “Yeah, apparently, over 50 percent of consumers get on a social media site everyday. Did you know, according to the report, over 60 percent of new business is found one those types of sites?” In this example, you keep the focus on the business and demonstrate your attention to market trends.

Credibility
Broadcasting and engagement in this way can build your credibility, but social media sites can build your company’s credibility even further. How? By integrating your profile with your customers.

For example, ask your customers to write the comments regarding your products or services on your Facebook wall. Including this sort of element on your Facebook profile is similar to the “Testimonials” pages seen on many websites early on. As the comments are actually posted by your customers, their statements are seen as more genuine than ones you would publish to your website, making your business all the more credible.